This invention relates to a method of preparing items to be mailed, comprising the steps of individually feeding main documents; supplying processing instructions in association with each of the main documents to a control unit; and feeding selected enclosure documents to each of the main documents in reaction to supplied processing instructions associated with respective ones of the documents.
Such a method is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,606,728. In this method, stocks of each enclosure are each loaded into a separate feeder station. The enclosure codes associated with a document each refer to a particular feeder station. In response to enclosure codes associated with a particular main document being fed, the feeder stations are selectively activated or driven to feed an enclosure document at such a time that this enclosure document is added to the main document.
Because in this prior art method the enclosure documents are printed before the preparation of the items to be mailed is carried out, it has to be known for the purpose of printing the enclosure documents how many copies of each enclosure document are required during a particular period of operation or within the framework of a particular mailing action. In practice, it has been found that this is often difficult to foresee, as a result of which shortages occur regularly and excess enclosure documents are regularly destroyed. It need not be explained that this entails not only considerable costs but also a waste of raw materials and energy as well as a considerable environmental problem.
Also when loading the feeder stations, due account must be taken of the required numbers of each enclosure document during a particular run. Further, coordination is required in order to ensure that the enclosure documents are loaded into the correct feeder stations. This, however, can easily give rise to errors and misunderstandings, for instance between a mailing coordination department and a mailroom. When in drawing up the code associated with a main document the assumption was, for instance, that an enclosure document "A" is stored in feeder station No. 1, the enclosure code "1" will be added to main documents to which enclosure "A" is to be added. If other enclosures, for instance enclosures "C", have been loaded into feeder station No. 1, enclosure "C" will be added to the main documents to which enclosure "A" should be added.
A further drawback of this prior art method is that if a large variety of possible enclosures is desired, a large number of feeder stations are required, which feeder stations moreover have to be loaded and operated.
Applicant's commonly owned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/019,431, filed Feb. 18, 1993, discloses a method whereby enclosure codes associated with a main document refer directly to the enclosures in question. In this method, however, it should first be determined which enclosures have been loaded into which feeder stations, before the preparation of the items to be mailed can be started. Further, although in the system proposed in that application the feeder stations are of more compact and simpler design than is generally the case with systems for carrying out the method described hereinbefore, it still suffers from the inherent drawback that if a large variety of enclosure documents which are to be fed in random order is desired, a correspondingly large number of enclosure stations are required.
From U.S. Pat. No. 4,800,505 it is known to print a classification designation associated with the main document on mail items which are to be returned to the sender (for instance a reply envelope).
In this method the printing instructions for printing this classification designation are part of processing instructions associated with a particular document. As a result, these processing instructions are relatively extensive and a large amount of information must be generated and transferred for each main document. According as the printing instructions are more extensive, this drawback plays a larger role.
The drawback that extensive processing information must be printed on the main document each time, is obviated in this prior art method by printing an identification code, rather than the processing instructions, on the main document, storing the processing instructions (including the printing instructions) in a memory in association with the identification code printed on that particular associated main document and supplying the processing instructions to the control unit when the identification code in question has been read from a main document supplied. This, however, complicates the preparation of items to be mailed considerably and requires a large memory, because for each main document the associated printing instructions are stored separately in the memory before starting the processing of a series of main documents.